Belt conveyors typically permit some of the conveyed material to fall on the inner surface of the lower stretch of the belt and some of this material will usually find its way onto one of the end pulleys and be drawn between the belt and the pulley surface. Since this can damage the belt and cause the system to malfunction, self-cleaning conveyor belt pulleys of the type shown in U.S. Pat. No. 3,046,805 have been devised.
Self-cleaning conveyor belt pulleys are typically constructed of numerous metal parts which must be stamped out or cut out and then welded together. This is a very time consuming and labor intensive process, thereby making this type of pulley more expensive to produce than some other types. Another problem with prior art wing pulley devices is that the parts used therein are of significantly different dimensions for each size of pulley.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,055,229 to Mecham attempts to address the aforementioned problem by utilizing somewhat Z-shaped building block segments to construct a self-cleaning conveyor belt pulley. The Mecham invention, which was patented in 1962, has not become a commercially successful invention and it is surmised that the reason that the major pulley manufacturers do not use this method of constructing self-cleaning conveyor belt pulleys is because it requires long welds across the pulley in difficult to reach places, thereby not fully achieving the desired result of minimizing the amount of welding and assembly time necessary to produce a cheaper, yet dependable self-cleaning conveyor belt pulley. Another problem with prior art self-cleaning conveyor belt pulleys is that there have been no building block segments devised which are universal enough to apply to make pulleys of different sizes and lengths without major modifications to each building block segment.
Accordingly, there is a need for a process for making self-cleaning conveyor belt pulleys whereby a more universal building block segment can be utilized to decrease the amount of welding and assembly time to produce self-cleaning conveyor belt pulleys of various sizes.